Thought I'm Wrestling With: When Frustration Isn't Justified

A quiet challenge to the way we judge human mistakes.

It’s Thursday night. Been a long work week. Project isn’t going according to plan. You missed the gym a few days staying late to help your team. Your routine’s off, so you haven’t done your usual grocery haul. But nonetheless, you get home and decide it’s the right occasion to treat yourself to an UberEats order.

Finally, some comfort in the midst of a hectic week.

Thirty minutes later, your order shows up. Your endorphins start jumping at the mere thought of enjoying this meal in the next few minutes.

You pick up the order at your front door. Walk back to the kitchen. Open the bag.

Wrong order.

Like any normal human, I think it’s safe to say we’d all get frustrated here. Maybe even regardless of the setup I just laid out. You could be having the best day of your life—someone still messes up your order and all hell breaks loose.

It’s totally reasonable to react that way. Hell, I do. You spent your hard-earned money on a transaction you wanted executed to your specifications. A certain level of competence is expected—hence why you ordered from them in the first place.

But the conflict I keep running into—and keep wrestling with—is this: I’m getting mad at a human for not being perfect.
As if I’ve never made a mistake.
As if I’m some finished product with my shit together, just waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

That’s a bit hypocritical. I’m as imperfect as the person walking next to me. All 8 billion of us are.

And yet—even with that understanding—I still catch myself slipping into this mindset where I assume other people are just more off their shit than I am. So I get frustrated at their incompetence. Then I get mad at myself for thinking like that. It’s egotistical. I know it. And so begins the spiral.

What’s helped lately is running a mental exercise: when I’m about to get irritated, I try putting myself in the other person’s shoes. I invent a plausible reason why they might’ve messed up. Just to play devil’s advocate against my own frustration.

And you know what? It actually helps. As I start rehearsing these little fictitious defenses in my head, the tension naturally starts to diffuse. I’m reminding myself: I’m not dealing with a machine. I’m dealing with a human.

That person might not be incompetent. The restaurant might not be a bad restaurant.
A mistake happened. That’s all. Because a human was involved—and humans always make mistakes.

And if you interpret every mistake as the new norm, I fear you’ll live a much worse life than if you simply chalk it up as what it is: an occasional human error. Because lord knows you make them too.

Which brings me to a bigger question I’ve been sitting with:
Where do we draw the line between a forgivable error and a justifiable frustration?
When am I actually allowed to be upset that someone let me down?

Here’s one thought:
Anytime you willingly hand over your money to another human, you’re taking a risk. And that’s on you. If you’re unwilling to accept the risk of human imperfection, then your only option is to do it all yourself—or micromanage until it’s done. But that’s completely impractical.

That would mean personally driving to the restaurant, placing the order yourself, standing next to the chef to make sure they get it right, then overseeing the hand-off to the Uber driver to ensure safe delivery.

You’re paying for the convenience of not having to do all that.

And as I mentioned in a recent post, we’ve specialized as a society to the point where we can rely on others to get things done. Most of the time.

But money isn’t a guarantee of competence. You’d like it to be—but it isn’t.

So now I use something I’ve started calling The Envy Question.

If I don’t admire something about the person I’m frustrated with—if I don’t aspire to be more like them in some way—what gives me the right to hold them to a higher standard?

“Envy” might not be the perfect word, but it gets at something. If I wouldn’t trade lives with them, why am I demanding perfection from them?

Now—this isn’t to belittle anyone. Especially those in service roles. But let’s be honest: when you pull up to McDonald's for a double mac, are you expecting Michelin-star execution from someone who’s probably overworked, underpaid, and managing 12 orders at once?

You kind of know what you’re signing up for. And if you choose to walk into that transaction anyway, then that decision—and all its risks—is on you.

But there are people I hold to a higher standard. People I respect. People I want to be more like.

Let’s say it’s a friend or mentor you admire—their character, their integrity, the way they move through the world. You’ve modeled parts of yourself off of them. So when they drop the ball—when they ghost you, snap at you, or act out of line with who they usually are—it stings.

That frustration is different.
It’s not about superiority.
It’s about shared standards. It’s about disappointment rooted in respect.

That, to me, is the only kind of frustration that feels truly valid—when it’s pointed at someone I genuinely look up to, and it comes from believing they can be better.

Because I want them to be.

I just think in life, it’s hypocritical to expect everyone else to have their shit together—when we most certainly don’t.

So don’t just get frustrated next time.

Pause. Breathe. And remember: if you’re trusting another human to do something for you—especially someone you wouldn’t switch places with—you’re rolling the dice.

And that’s okay. We all are.

That’s the cost of convenience.
The cost of community.
The cost of being human together.